A statue with limitations: Lessons from the installation of 'Fearless Girl'

We're glad to see support surge to keep the spunky statue known as "Fearless Girl" firmly planted near Wall Street, in a spot until now the exclusive territory of the ferocious Charging Bull she stares down.

Thronged with love from locals and tourists alike, she should stay.

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But cementing the bronze moppet's place in the New York City streetscape requires reckoning with her most unusual path to Broadway, pursued by a major business partner of the city's in the thick of a big deal.

The company in question is the investment bank State Street Global Advisors, which commissioned the work in anticipation of International Women's Day on March 8 — finding in the figure of a small female standing up to the snorting taurus an ingenious vehicle to broadcast to the world its commitment to getting more women on corporate boards.

The statue, in the making since last year, was custom-cast for the site, down to the swish of the girl's ponytail mirroring the bull's snapping tail. She even stands on a new spit of cobblestone mimicking Charging Bull's turf.

Yet handlers only applied for a city permit this February, obtaining permission in the guise of a five-day "street event ." Such was the instant acclaim that a day after the statue's arrival, Mayor de Blasio tweeted: "The Fearless Girl: Standing tall in Lower Manhattan through April 2nd."

A clever child she is, to have snuck so stealthily around the city's well-considered process for reviewing public art installations, which involves review of traffic, engineering, aesthetic and community concerns.

To fast-track Fearless Girl to remain indefinitely would be to invite well-financed viral marketing schemes to establish beachheads on city streets willy-nilly.

This instance happens to involve the Boston-based custodian of New York City's $179 billion in retiree pension funds, last October denied a full three-year renewal of its $30 million contract by Controller Scott Stringer and instead renewed for a mere six months expiring in May, for reasons the controller's office declined to specify.

A company that, though it denies any connection, just might have a cold motive to warm the hearts of a city wild about "Fearless Girl."